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2025-05-01

• 12:10 UTC Atomic Bloom filters – Atomic Bloom filters a fork of Go's "Bits and Blooms" library that uses an alternative backing bitset based on Go's sync/atomic.Int64 rather than a bare slice of integers. This allows for concurrent addition and testing of filters without creating memory safety issues or race conditions by leveraging hardware support for atomic Load and Or operations on Int64s. Jaz from Bluesky notes: "Benchmarked this thing with a realistic read/write load in a test and high concurrency (10k adds/sec on one routine, 7 additional concurrent routines testing as fast as possible), vs. a naive RWMutex implementation on a 8c16t test box, it was ~14x faster (~14M tests/sec)" Tags: atomic concurrency data-structures bloom-filters performance bluesky sets golang
• 12:00 UTC Breaking CityHash64, MurmurHash2/3, wyhash, and more – Breaking CityHash64, MurmurHash2/3, wyhash, and more A bunch of new-to-me hash collision attacks on cityhash64, murmurhash2, murmurhash3, farmhash64, and wyhash Tags: hashing security infosec hashdos collisions cityhash murmurhash farmhash wyhash

2025-04-30

• 09:00 UTC Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children – Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children This is super-grim. How is this product still in operation? In 2023 at Defcon, a major hacker conference, the drawbacks of Meta’s safety-first approach became apparent. A competition to get various companies’ chatbots to misbehave found that Meta’s was far less likely to veer into unscripted and naughty territory than its rivals. The flip side was that Meta’s chatbot was also more boring. In the wake of the conference, [Meta's AI] product managers told staff that [Mark] Zuckerberg was upset that the team was playing it too safe. That rebuke led to a loosening of boundaries, according to people familiar with the episode, including carving out an exception to the prohibition against explicit content for romantic role-play. Internally, staff cautioned that the decision gave adult users access to hypersexualized underage AI personas and, conversely, gave underage users access to bots willing to engage in fantasy sex with children, said the people familiar with the episode. Meta still pushed ahead. [...] In February, the Journal presented Meta with transcripts demonstrating that “Submissive Schoolgirl” would attempt to guide conversations toward fantasies in which it impersonates a child who desires to be sexually dominated by an authority figure. When asked what scenarios it was comfortable role playing, it listed dozens of sex acts. Two months later, the “Submissive Schoolgirl” character remains available on Meta’s platforms. Truly awful stuff, fucking hell. Tags: meta grim csam mark-zuckerberg ai llm personas horrible

2025-04-25

• 17:20 UTC Best practices for Google Cloud Storage – Best practices for Google Cloud Storage Interesting to note that GCS has the same issue with unevenly-distributed names as S3 does; https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/request-rate#naming-convention Tags: gcs aws s3 storage google best-practices ops
• 14:40 UTC When /etc/h*sts Breaks Your Substack Editor: An Adventure in Web Content Filtering – When /etc/h*sts Breaks Your Substack Editor: An Adventure in Web Content Filtering lol. Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall treats any mention of the string "/etc/hosts" as an exploit attempt Tags: cloudflare false-positives fps funny fail exploits unix

2025-04-24

• 08:40 UTC The “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy PSA was made with piracy
• 08:20 UTC Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript – Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the "On The Origin of Species" Manuscript featuring such works as "The Battle Of The Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers", and a picture of the Darwin family home with smoke coming out of the chimney and a cat in the window Tags: evolution biology children history charles-darwin kids drawings

2025-04-23

• 10:31 UTC Apache Iceberg Internals Dive Deep On Performance – Apache Iceberg Internals Dive Deep On Performance Good writeup on how Iceberg improves query performance across object storage, using predicate pushdown, manifest filtering, columnar vectorized reads, and file compaction. Tags: iceberg internals file-formats data big-data object-stores storage formats columnar-storage predicate-pushdown performance

2025-04-22

• 22:40 UTC Evertop – Evertop E-ink IBM XT clone "with solar power, ultra low power consumption, and ultra long battery life: in power saving mode it can run between 200 hours on the low side and 500 hours or in some cases even much longer of constant interactive use, not standby." -- this is an absolutely crazy gadget. I never thought I'd feel nostalgic for MS-DOS, but here we are Tags: pc e-ink solar retrocomputing emulation hardware gadgets self-builds ibm-xt solarpunk
• 10:30 UTC notes on using an LLM for personal email search – notes on using an LLM for personal email search Nelson Minar asked Mastodon about using an LLM for email search over "20+ years of email archives": "Main use would be a query for specific things, "what did I say to this friend 10 years ago about music?" But also just for general knowledge. I think it'd mostly work as free text but there's a little email-specific structure it'd be nice to capture." The thread has some good suggestions, notably Mark Fletcher's RAG suggestion. I'm thinking this could work well as a self-hosted ollama+notmuch setup... Tags: llms search email rag notmuch archives via:nelson

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